Tourney Expansion

The Big Ten commish says the tournament will be expanded to 96 teams. LINK What do you think this means? Other than the entire Big East will be in the tourney.

Does this cheapen the accomplishment of getting in? Currently the NIT selects teams based on money; presumably the additional NCAA teams would be merit based. Will more mid-majors be selected? Will they all be placed in lower seeds to knock each other out?

I oppose it just based on the lack of clarity or criteria for who would get in. Would it just encourage further mediocrity for big conferences, reward some of the smaller ones? Would expanding the tournament further diminish the importance of the entire regular season, or render conference tourneys obsolete? (I mean really if a big team can just play horrible schools and then .500 play in their conferences and get in, how is that encouraging competition?)

I favor expansion only if the selection committee is no longer 60% BCS schools by NCAA rules. I see no purpose being served by just voting in more undeserving BCS schools who can't even represent in their conferences.

Purplegeezer wrote:I favor expansion only if the selection committee is no longer 60% BCS schools by NCAA rules. I see no purpose being served by just voting in more undeserving BCS schools who can't even represent in their conferences.

Prediction: expansion slots will go to BCS schools that either won the regular season conference, or got second in the conference tourney. Thi$ will be great for the $port.

Sounds like the plan is for all the 9 through 24 seeds to play an extra game in the same time frame as current, with the 1 - 8 seeds getting a bye to the Thursday-Friday games. Gives a big advantage to the top seeds. Fewer Cinderellas.

Update: the first round games are Thur-Fri, same as today. Winners play the top seeds, who got a bye, on Sat-Sun. Then, another round of games on Tues-Wed are squeezed in to see who makes the regionals. So, a lower seed would need to win 5 games in 10 days to advance to the Final Four.

From the AP:

The new format would start two days later than the current 65-team field because it would eliminate the Tuesday play-in game and would conclude on the same day, a Monday. It would be played at one fewer venue — again, the play-in game — and the NCAA says it would include no additional travel time for teams.

The first-round games for the 64 non-bye teams would take place on Thursday and Friday, with the winners playing the top eight seeds in each region on Saturday and Sunday. Winners on Saturday would likely play again on Tuesday, and the Sunday winners on Wednesday.

Those winners would then move on to the regionals, playing alternate days starting on Thursday. Shaheen said the NCAA hasn't decided on whether to keep the same sites for second and first-round games or to make the midweek sites the same as the regionals.

WAIT, so they want the extra bids to soften up the mid majors before they get to the big $$$ schools? How revolutionary... I mean they could even call it the "Wild Card" round just to spice it up, I mean, I'm just spit balling here, but I think we're really on to something

Why don't they just make it an all-comers tourney. Do it like the US Open, with sectionals, regionals, sub-sectionals, super-regionals. They could actually place teams in their regions (for example WCC schools play Pac-10, Horizon plays Big 10) and just keep moving on from there.

Or they could just eliminate the regular season, randomly draw teams for round robins. Then go from there, maybe to another round robin. Then at some point seeding those teams into an elimination tournament. Kind of like the Champions league.

The best part of this news is for employer who will not lose as much productivity on Thursday and Friday with the non-bye teams playing. The companies hurt the worst, the ones that do the studies to see how much workplace productivity is lost during the tourney.